CRM - April 2008 - (Page 16)

CRM TRENDS AND NEWS ANALYSIS A Tenancy of One’s Own Just when the battle between on-demand and on-premise CRM seemed to settle down a bit, a new one opens up: single-tenant architecture versus multitenancy W hen Oracle Corp. anThe Pulse HOW DOES YOUR COMPANY HANDLE ITS CRM SOLUTION? nounced the latest version On-premise 31% of Siebel On Demand in February, the company Hosted by our CRM vendor 9% relit a coal believed extinguished since Hosted by another party 6% the early days of online delivery. The Single-tenant on-demand 0% release—offcially known as Oracle’s Multi-tenant on-demand 48% Siebel On Demand–Single Tenant, No current or planned activity 6% Enterprise Edition (STEE)—appeared to resurrect the concept of single-tenancy. According to Oracle executives, each customer of the new product would access a fully dedicated database, middleware, and application instance of STEE, running on a server at Oracle’s Austin, Texas, facility reserved solely for that company. This would seem to flout Source: destinationCRM.com reader poll otherwise accepted practices in on“Most SaaS vendors provision some demand CRM, where multitenancy has month, and includes Oracle’s business intelligence stack. This contradicts other weekly downtime in their service conbeen the buzzword for several years. The idea behind multitenant applica- vendors’ previous claims that multitenant tracts for maintenance, whether they use tion delivery is that a vendor’s entire cus- deployments cost less, and that those it or not; typically this is on the weekend,” tomer base runs on the same instance of savings were passed on to the customer; Lye says.“But a company like [Oracle custhe software, while single-tenant deploy- Salesforce.com, perhaps the strongest tomer] GMAC does a lot of business on ments provide a single instance for each proponent of multitenant SaaS, charges the weekend, especially Saturday, and can’t customer, typically on a dedicated server. $125 per user, per month, for its own afford downtime when customers are Enterprise Edition and $65 per financing car purchases.” Single-tenancy, The term coined for singleuser, per month, for its Profes- he says, allows Oracle customers to schedtenant deployment—when “Multitenancy has sional Edition, one step down. ule maintenance whenever the work it was fashionable in the “Multitenancy has never makes the most sense for their businesses. late 1990s—was applica- never provided the Lye also claims greater ease in guaranprovided the customer with tion service provider (ASP). customer with any any direct benefit whatsoever,” teeing data security and overall system Today’s multitenant comdirect benefit says Anthony Lye, senior vice availability via Oracle’s 20,000-server data panies prefer the term president of Siebel CRM On center.“If one machine goes down, 99 still software-as-a-service (SaaS). whatsoever.” Demand. In addition to the run; there are no systemwide service outOracle contends that it is offering customers a number of choices apparent lack of expense, Lye notes that ages,” he says. Most security breaches, he that have been absent from the market- STEE provides advantages that multi- says, occur through phishing—and rather place. One area where Oracle clearly tenant systems can’t. One of these is the than exposing every customer, a singledeparts from the expected norm is with ability for customers to schedule main- tenant system exposes only the one comprice: STEE goes for $70 per user, per tenance around their own convenience. promised company and its server. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | APRIL 2008 www.destinationCRM.com 16 http://www.destinationCRM.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - April 2008

CRM - April 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point A Tenancy of One’s Own The Rebirth of Taxes destinationCRM Dashboard Labor Disputes Reach The Contract Center The Plight of the Wirelines Required Reading The 2008 Service Awards The 2008 Service Leader Awards Customer Self-Service Microsoft Genesys Oracle eGain Astute Solutions The 2008 Rising Stars The 2008 Service Elite Awar Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - April 2008

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